Thursday, October 25, 2007

Microsoft and Facebook

Microsoft late yesterday entered a deal to solidify their alliance with social networking site Facebook. The deal, worth $240 million will give Microsoft Corporation a 1.6 percent stake in Facebook. This latest move also leverages Microsoft's drive to increase revenues in Internet advertising as its main rival Google Inc expand its dominance of web-based market. Microsoft's online ad revenue stands at $1.84 billion compared to Google's recent ad revenue of $13.3 billion. More

Tuesday, October 23, 2007

RIM Shares up as Blackberry enters China!


Research in Motion shares jumped 8% today on the news that the Blackberry phones will now be marketed in China. CEO Jim Basillie made the announcement regarding the Alcatel-Lucent joint venture today which drove the company's share price to $120.42 on the TSX. This follows weeks of speculation as the markets were awaiting this long overdue announcement and reacted as expected. More

Monday, October 22, 2007

WiMAX now ITU Standard!

New WiMAX Standard
Last week was historic for the wireless broadband industry as it ended with the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) approving WiMAX technology as a part of the IMT-2000 set of wireless network standards. Thanks to the relentless efforts by the WiMAX Forum this tremendous milestone was achieved. The next step will be bringing service fees to acceptable levels as service providers and handset manufacturers converge. See full article from WiMAX Forum.

Sunday, October 21, 2007

New Tax for online music sale in Canada

Canada's Copyright Board has introduced a new tax for online music transactions according to a report from technology news portal EndgadgetMobile. This is somewhat similar to the fees levied against blank video and data media (CD, DVD, etc.) and will impact customizable radio portals like as pandora.com.

Rogers expands HSDPA to 22 Canadian markets


As Rogers Wireless continues the roll-out of its Next Generation wireless network (3G), HSDPA service is now available to subscribers in 25 Canadian markets. There is growing speculation that Rogers may opt to introduce the HTC iPhone to the Canadian market as a more technology capable mobile device, better suited for Rogers' network when compared to the hyped Apple phone. Rogers is currently promoting a suite of mobile video services codenamed "Vision" and this ongoing campaign coincides nicely with the recent HSDPA launch. Lets see how this one is played out.

Monday, October 15, 2007

ICANN moves closer to multilingual TLDs

Internet domain name regulator ICANN is moving closer to allowing the use of domain names that are from languages using non-latin letters and numbers. ICANN has launched a test page that allows users to visit web pages with URLs in 11 languages not using roman letters or numbers. These languages are Arabic, Persian, simplified and traditional Chinese, Russian, Hindi, Greek, Korean, Yiddish, Japanese and Tamil. More.

iPhone Canada? Not so fast!

Comwave Telecom Inc is taking Apple Computers to task over use of its trademark "iPhone" name here in Canada. Apple seem to have gotten over the Cisco Inc hurdle when it launched in the USA by entering into an agreement to share the name which Cisco Inc now owns through its acquisition of Linksys. Now in Canada, Apple might not be able to launch its celebrated "i-Phone" as Comwave maintains it will no be able to share the trademark being used for sometime now. Apple prides itself in being innovative however the recent launch of the iPod Touch is also following the lead of HTC with their trademark Touch technology. Mac-phone Canada? More.

Wednesday, October 10, 2007

Canadian Driving Made Easy-ier: Toronto, Montreal, Ottawa now Offers GPS Traffic Information

A couple of my colleagues were very boastful recently after we all headed to an off site location and they got there before me after leaving a full 10 minutes later than my group did. The advent of commercial GPS navigation systems marked a most significant advance in driving. In recent weeks the added feature of real time traffic update for drivers has been made available to three major Canadian cities on east coast.

Drivers in Toronto, Montreal and Ottawa are now accessing the Clear Channel’s Total Traffic Network which began broadcasting RDS-TMC data to Canada in early September. With this service GPS devices can access traffic information by way of a RDS-TMC receiver. The receiver accesses traffic information from FM radio broadcasts and passes this to the Garmin, TomTom or Mio GPS models that supports the system. GPS users are then notified about traffic status in the city due to traffic construction or accidents and could optionally provide alternate routes if required.

Tuesday, October 2, 2007

The prospect of a Google Phone

Google Inc could be in discussion with handset manufacturers and service providers to provide a "Google" type phone, Businessweek reported earlier this week. The proposed service would see subscribers receiving targeted location-based ads on their handsets as well as free call minutes when they viewed ads.